Access to Justice: Ukraine and Europe

The paper examines the right of access to justice through the lens of domestic and European experience. The purpose of the study is to improve the theoretical and legal provisions of the content of the right of access to justice based on European experience, the formation of its modern concept, including the construction of proposals for defining this concept in the domestic doctrine of the judiciary. The methodological basis of the study comprises a set of methods that have been comprehensively used to achieve the purposes of this paper: the study of the legal nature of the right of access to justice, the establishment of its structural elements, the formulation of conclusions and proposals for the implementation of European Court of Human Rights standards in Ukrainian legislation was carried out with the use of system-structural and Aristotelian methods. It is noted that the access to justice is the availability, legal consolidation, and direct functioning of guarantees stipulated by law, which allow everyone to freely exercise their right to judicial protection and restoration of the violated right. It is concluded that the right to judicial protection cannot be exercised without a mechanism of access to justice and legal regulation. Ukraine, as a full subject of international law, must guarantee, based on universal standards, the personal right of every individual to free access to justice. However, identification of the social nature of the right of access to justice, for any state, including Ukraine, means an assertion of a fairly wide margin of appreciation both upon specifying forms of support for citizens to exercise the right, and upon determining the categories of citizens who need such support. This obliges the legislator to respect the constitutional principles of justice, equality, proportionality, as well as stability and guarantee of human and civil rights in Ukraine.